The politics of forcing footballers to wear rainbow drives dagger into tolerance

The dismal moral judgements just kept on coming on Wednesday, with a public defenestration facing those individuals who, for reasons which are no one else’s business, do not wish to walk onto a football field wearing a rainbow message.

Noussair Mazraoui of Manchester United is a practicing Muslim who was reluctant to champion a LGBTQ cause with which his religion does not cohere. So he let it be known, before Sunday’s game against Everton, that a new piece of rainbow-branded Adidas merchandise – a ‘walk-on jacket’, as they call it – was not for him.

United sensed a storm, saw how the cameras and watching world would be fixated on the one player not stepping onto the pitch dressed in this jacket, and decided that none of their players would walk out in one.

The pile-on started within an hour or so of that becoming known. United’s Rainbow Devils supporters ‘respected’ Mazraoui views, yet not so much as to accept his right not to wear a jacket.

‘He had put the rest of the squad into a position where they felt that they couldn’t wear their jackets,’ they said. There would be a ‘negative effect on any player struggling with his sexuality.’

It was a statement to make your heart sink. A display of precisely the intolerance that the Rainbow Laces campaign supposedly set out to extinguish.

The rainbow was once a beautiful emblem of sporting inclusion - all creeds, all colours. Think Ellis Park Stadium, Johannesburg, June 1995 and a South African nation finally freed of intolerance becoming the ‘rainbow nation’ which lifted rugby union’s World Cup.

Yet here were unnamed people, speaking in its name, denigrating a footballer who had spoken ill of no one. Do they not see how deeply attractive that looks. Do they not see they are driving a dagger into the very heart of their enterprise.

It’s the place we seem to have arrive at. Expressing a wish not to wear a jacket carries a grave danger in these times. Accusations of intolerance and bigotry from those who simply will not tolerate behaviour outside of the parameters which they alone prescribe.

At the root of it all are the gesture politics that the wearing of a rainbow has come to be. What began as a powerful, progressive fight for inclusion and compassion has descended into an exercise in PR fascism, with all the focus centred on those who would rather not sign up to the cosy, homogenous pre-agreed world view and find themselves damned for it.

Ipswich Town’s Sam Morsy being demonised for leaving his rainbow armband in the dressing room was desperate. But the FA potentially bringing a charge against Crystal Palace’s Marc Guehi for stencilling ‘Jesus loves you’ across his own armband took us right down into the depths.

Guehi, the son of an evangelical pastor, sometimes still plays the drums at the church in Lewisham, southeast London, where his father will be preaching the same message this Advent as clergy up and down the land. ‘Jesus loves you’ will certainly feature. But not all Christian upbringings have modern ‘western’ tolerance at their core.

Those three words Guehi inked onto his band were the message of an individual who, with that upbringing at his core, who could not simply walk meekly down the road that others ordered him to follow.

The fury these episodes create have morphed into a more general culture war which is drowning in its own hypocrisy. A landscape in which the demand to wear certain emblems is seemingly more justifiable than others.

Wrexham’s Irish wing back James McClean, for example, found himself vilified last month for refusing to wear a poppy or to link with teammates for a pre-match silence on Remembrance weekend. The attacks on that player were no less abhorrent. No-one has the right force an Irishman into what he has always considered to be an act of reflection for another country’s army.

But the farce of Guehi being penalised for his message at Christmas should be the line in the sand which banishes these virtue-signalling bandwagons from a sporting realm in which they have no place.

Somewhere along the line, football seems to have forgotten the blanket ban on slogans that the FA’s International Football Association Board imposed in 2014, in the knowledge that the impossibility of making moral judgements about which messages are acceptable in a sport played by those from so many countries and cultures.

Someone pointed out amid the latest storm yesterday that 64 different nationalities are represented in the Premier League, as well as myriad denominations. How does football expect such a vast array of perspectives to buy into its rainbow messaging as one coherent whole?

The FA find themselves drowning in the same disequilibrium they found last year, when lighting up Wembley in the colours of Ukraine, yet deciding not to light the Wembley arch in the colours of Israel following the atrocities committed there by Hamas two weeks earlier.

There was, of course, also the Premier League’s alignment with Black Lives Matters, an organisation found to hold such extreme aims as defunding the police.

To speak for those who chose not to wear the rainbow armband itself carries risk of illiberalism and cancellation. But I write with the life-affirming experience of interviewing Liam Davis in mind.

When he and I spoke, ten years ago, he was a 23-year-old playing for Gainsborough Trinity in the Conference North – the kind of environment that can be deeply inhospitable, given that dressing rooms are often populated by those less familiar with the melting pot of big city communities and clubs located in rural places, where diversity and tolerance are slower to build.

Liam related how, during a conversation with the club's veteran goalkeeper, he had disclosed that he was gay, becoming the first individual in British professional or semi-professional football to come out. It was hard not to be moved by his quiet resolve and powers of articulation, which laughed in the face of bigotry.

Testimonies like Liam’s have slowly helped build inclusion to a point where a homophobic outburst in most football stands would not be tolerated by those within these days. Individuals like him are the real torchbearers.

At this summer’s Euros, it was observed how many of the England team had a deep faith. Bukayo Saka grew up in a devoutly Christian household in Ealing, west London, and attended a Pentecostal church in Uxbridge. Eberchi Eze said his own Christian faith was ‘hugely important.’ Ivan Toney wore his faith on his back, with a large tattoo of the Ten Commandments.

We did not know which form of faith each had been brought up with and we had no right to know – any more than those running a slick PR campaign which has done very well out of football has the right to dictate to players which armbands and jackets they must wear. How dare they? What makes them think the have the right?